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Process consultation revisited 19 differently. In the change process of the health-care agency, the managing director is seen as a legitimate authority figure. He is appreciated and accepted by nearly all members of the organization. When interviewed, one caregiver expressed this common feeling as: “he is a warm- hearted managing director, do you know that he knows every persons’ first name, we are an organization of approximately 450 people, amazing, isn’t it?”. In the change process of the consulting organization, the mutual perception of the relationship among the managing director and a large number of the organizational members is characterized by no ‘real’ contact, distrust, defending reactions, none acceptance, mutual blaming and complaining, etc. Over time, this feeling has spread over the entire organization. The relational context of the consulting organization in which interactions are embedded is furthermore characterized by uncertainty about the future of the company, a lack of a clear vision, a culture of ad hoc coping with problems, of unlimited autonomy and freedom, and of not keeping one’s commitments to each other without there being consequences. The overall mutually perception of relationships and intentions is “she/he wants to make progression at the expense of me, I cannot trust her/him”. On the contrary, the relational context of the care giving agency can be described as a ‘basic enthusiasm and energy’, high job satisfaction, a strong inspiring mission and vision that is understood, subscribed to and enacted in the daily work practices by the critical mass of the organizational members (“the talk is walked”), accepted leadership on all levels, problems that emerge are consequently translated into possibilities and actions for improvement, the shared practices of working on learning and development on all levels as enactment of a strong organizational value continuously stressed: “personal development is organizational development and vice versa”. The overall mutually perception of relationships and intentions is
Process consultation revisited 20 “we are here to help each other to develop and in doing so, we simultaneously develop our organization”. Hence, relational practices are continuously embedded in a specific historical-relational context which is always partly actualized in the interactions actors engage in. Interactions have to be considered in their relational context to assess whether they can bring about successful organizational change. From the ‘relational practice’ point of view, it becomes very clear that the meaning of a situation and the type of membership in that specific context is socially constructed between the actors right on the spot. Actors complement each other’s activity into meaningful episodes. The practice and the quality of the relationship are enacted simultaneously. A distant researcher’s perspective would be able to identify a large amount of ‘variables’ to describe this particular context and to make interpretations, but it is only through looking into the joint practices and interaction patterns that the meaning making among the actors can be described and understood. The narratives of the joint practices were the most important output in this (and the Geelian) study and can be considered as ‘knowledge in context’. During academic training in psychology, the emphasis was mostly on the outsider’s perspective from a distance. The illustrations makes very clear the difference between academic knowledge and actionable knowledge. Academic knowledge is distanced, generalized and de-contextualized. It has big difficulty to inform skilled action in context. Actionable knowledge is embedded in relational practices that are enacted among the key actors involved, building on existing meanings and memberships in the actual contexts. Mutually negotiating a joint learning space. In a two year long advanced professional development program for group and organizational consultants of our universities (in which the managing directors of the care giving agency and consulting organization have participated), we
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